Investigating the relationship between cultural sovereignty and Congolese emancipation
After Congolese Prime Minister Lumumba’s body was dissolved in acid, a Belgian police officer, Gerard Soete, kept his gold tooth as a sordid memento. Championing pan-Africanism, Patrice Lumumba was detested by Western nations, who ultimately assassinated him in 1961. Soete kept Lumumba’s tooth as a morbid trophy and brought it to Belgium where it remained until 2022. For centuries, every aspect of the Congolese body politic has been and continues to be exploited, from forced labour to stolen artefacts.
In recent years, there have been calls for Western nations to return the art they stole from their former colonies. Activists in this effort are calling for repatriation – the return of cultural artefacts from metropolitan institutions to the local communities from which they emerged. However, their efforts are being thwarted by museums and institutions who claim that all cultural artefacts are “universal” and need to be safekept in European hands.
Established in 1898, the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) operates in Tervuren, Belgium, and displays art, weapons, musical instruments, grave goods, and even human remains violently taken from the region. Sovereignty is tied to ownership: ownership of land, financial resources, and culture. During imperial conquests, colonial powers stole cultural heritage as trophies of war and later decontextualised them to the status of art.
The possession of these art objects, held mostly by Europeans, is a power signal, announcing to the world that they own cultural heritage. Forced and coerced removal of these objects erases the colonised’s memory; they lose knowledge of their cultural heritage. Statues currently held in the RCMA are meant to bring fertility, prosperity, and trap the spirit of death within them. But labelled behind glass, these stolen objects are removed from their culture and desacralised into property of the museum and of Belgium. The museum controls representation and history, projecting a reality to the viewer who is trained to see sacred objects as nothing more than a commodity. Ownership brings with it power, and those who have the power to own art, hold the power of the ones who made it.
Yet, artefacts carry meaning of their own. As opposed to the European conception of artefacts, Achilles Mbembe points to African modes of thinking, where spiritual meaning and autonomy are embedded in these objects. In European ways of thinking, human beings, specifically white human beings, were viewed as completely separate from objects and animals. Mbembe surmises that “in a world set on objectifying everybody, everything becomes a profit.”
Underlying this objectification is what Mbembe terms ‘necropolitics,’ where “sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.” Mbembe describes how the spatial relations of colonisation were needed to reconfigure social hierarchies. Belgium’s power over human life was translated into the economy: Congolese people were treated as instruments of slave labor and production, losing their homes, bodily autonomy, and political enfranchisement. Belgium presented their colonial agenda as a war between a state and an “uncivilised” group of people, dehumanised so as to not legitimate Congolese sovereignty.
These philosophies transferred to the cultural artefacts of the Congolese: the art objects became subsumed to the narrative of the Belgians. Artefacts are equal to human beings in terms of spiritual significance. Their necropolitical position in these museums—reduced to commodities for consumption—mirror the exploitation actual Congolese people experience as a form of violence.
For Mbembe, the “ultimate expression of sovereignty” is one where the object becomes the subject. The project of politics is one of fully realised autonomy reached through recognition and self-representation, for both objects and humans. There is much sovereignty in having power over one’s body and being able to represent oneself: the personal body relates directly to the body politic.
One of Mobutu’s notable acts was the authenticité movement in the 1970s to instill a sense of cultural pride for the Congolese people. Colonial names were changed to traditional Congolese: Leopoldville became Kinshasa, even the country, formerly Congo Belge, became Zaïre. His most fervent goal was a policy one, urging that all traditional art be returned to Zaïre. By inspiring contemporary artists and acknowledging Congolese history, authenticité aimed to legitimize the nation-state. Mobutu said as much to the UN General Assembly: the transfer of such goods from Zaïre was due to colonial occupation.
But, colonial powers have long avoided restitution. Cultural heritage is a multifaceted resource for the process of decolonisation, which is not lost on the Belgians. The government has a financial incentive to hold on to these artefacts, further undermining the postcolonial sovereignty of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and downplaying their brutal occupation. By steering clear of restitution in favour of conserving universal heritage, the unequal power balances between both nations seldom gets acknowledged, and so is never remedied on an economic level. Those who have the power to display, to buy, and to own cultural heritage hold a firmer grasp on their history, and, by extension, their countries.
Cultural heritage could be deployed to unify and mobilise the Congolese towards the construction of postcolonial sovereignty; nationalising these objects brings the Congolese one step closer to nationalising other natural resources. Restitution differs from repatriation, focusing not only on the return of objects, but of knowledge, reinstating goods to their appropriate communities and families. Letting go of the colonial categories inscribed in museums can re-appropriate the artefact and the power for the Congolese by inverting the colonial hegemonic relationship.
The story of looted art from the Democratic Republic of the Congo is inseparable from broader struggles of political sovereignty. By holding on to these items, European powers are holding on to the narrative of their colonial rule. In a world shaped by imperial legacies, the decolonial project must be both material and symbolic. To repatriate art is to repatriate power.
